Zoom.ai Believes an Automated Assistant is the Fix for a Weighty Workload

Zoom.ai wants to give managers and others in enterprise a gift that has a very high value in business: Time. Company founder Roy Pereira told me at Montreal’ Startupfest that while tools are making us more productive, we’re also expected to handle more, and that’s causing a growing problem his startup hopes to address with AI.

The startup, just six months old, is part of Betaworks’ initial BotCamp cohort, one of eight startups selected to receive $200,000 in seed funding, working space in NYC’s Betaworks Studio and guidance from people at the top bot platforms, including Kik, Slack and more. BotCamp is designed to capitalize on the recent boom in interest in chatbots by growing some unique early-stage companies.

Zoom.ai has an approach that differs from chatbot startups, however. Its target users are enterprise customers, in a market more generally associated with consumer-facing products. Plus, founder Roy Pereira doesn’t even like calling Zoom.ai a “chatbot” company.

“I don’t consider Zoom.ai a bot company,” Pereira told me. “Bots and the chat interface is really just a UI, the most appropriate UI for this problem I want to solve.”